What's gone amok in outdoor recreation?

The late 1960s and '70s were the "good ol' days" of outdoor recreation, a time when interest was high, federal funding was abundant for land acquisition, jobs were plentiful, and university curricula in outdoor recreation were springing up all over the country. Since that time, many changes have occurred including decreased funding for land acquisition, cutbacks in operating funds, fewer jobs, and a decrease in the number of universities offering outdoor recreation concentrations. With more pressure being placed on our nation's natural resources as well as a decrease in professional training for outdoor recreation provision and protection, it seems high time to rejuvenate professional interest in our nation's outdoor heritage.

More than 260 million federal, 42 million state, and 10 million local acres of land are available for recreational use in the United States. Among these areas are mountains, forests, lakes, rivers, deserts, beaches, and prairies. Outdoor recreation includes any sort of fun or enjoyment found in the outdoors that involves resource use for an activity or series of activities of choice. This includes driving a 8300,000 motor home to a campground that has telephone, television, and Internet connections at each campsite; a five-day solo backpacking trip in the Marshall Wilderness area; white-water rafting the mighty Gauley; a tie-dyeing experience in a family campground; or walking with a naturalist and enjoying a discussion about flowers and honeybees.

Yet, outdoor recreation is more than just the activity. There is something special found only in that environment necessary for a particular activity that is essential to the meaning of the enjoyment sought. The environment, whether natural or modified by human agencies, contributes to most recreation experiences. The quality of the environment is significant to the quality perceived or satisfaction gained from an outdoor experience. Crowding, standing in line, filthy or inadequate facilities, unsafe conditions, erosion, excessive population, or just plain boredom may send users in search of a better place. Therefore, management for outdoor recreation, as well as protection of the resource, becomes a delicate balance between provision and restriction. In this article, we hope to provide some helpful advice for you, your agency, and your clientele.

What Gives Us the Right?

After 10-plus years of working in the professional ranks in both the public and private sectors, I [Stuart] obtained my degree and am now an educator in leisure sciences. My father, Richard Cottrell, has taught students through consortia, workshops, seminars, and lectures at more than 20 universities. His professional field experience is a bit broader than mine and includes 39 years with the U.S. Forest Service and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA); he has also served as a consultant for folks all across America, with NATO in Europe, and with the Japanese government. He and I have conducted numerous applied research studies to determine what users really think about their outdoor experiences. This combined experience, enjoyment, and interaction with other professionals provides us an overview of what has happened in outdoor recreation, what is happening, and what we can do to help the profession.

To Which Philosophy Do You Adhere?

It's interesting to note that those professionals we consider outstanding contributors to the field appear to follow a professional philosophy that pertains to their approach to leisure service provision. Do you have an outdoor recreation philosophy? We think the best guidance comes from the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (ORRRC) report of 1962. The following quote is found on the back cover of all 27 volumes of the report:

The outdoors lies deep in American tradition. It has had immeasurable impact on the nation's character and on those who have made its history. When an American looks for the meaning of his past, he seeks it not only in ancient ruins, but more likely in mountains and forests, by a river, or at the edge of the sea... Today's challenge is to assure all Americans permanent access to their outdoor heritage.

[Note: Pay particular attention to the content of the last statement, on which we will comment later in this article.]

Interfacing with hundreds of other folks working in outdoor recreation has, for the most part, been a tremendous blessing. One person, Ralph C. Wilson, a mentor to us both, was in our view the nation's top leisure service professional. As chief of recreation for the USDA Soil Conservation Service, he served as president of the National Recreation and Park Association, the American Park and Recreation Society, and the European Recreation Society. Two editions of the textbook Planning Parks for People are dedicated to Mr. Wilson. A brief excerpt from the dedication page reads:

Unlike most professionals who work within one or two interest areas in the recreation realm, Ralph (who passed away in May of 1985) had broad concerns for and about impacts on outdoor, municipal, therapeutic, military, sports, private, and international recreation. Ralph advocated recreation progress in a broad sense. He disdained favoring advances for one user group at the expense of another, advocating both wilderness use and off road vehicle riding, for example.

The recent initiative "TV Free America," a program that encourages Americans to enhance other facets of life by reducing the amount of television they watch, is one example of the type of professionalism to which we are referring. Another is the "At-Risk Youth Recreation Consortium," which is sponsored by NRPA, formed to provide evidence of the effectiveness of park and recreation programs that serve youth living in high-risk environments.

Dropping in the Ratings

This brings us to the meat of our article: As we near the new millenium, where are we in outdoor recreation? We think outdoor recreation is in serious trouble. We made reference earlier to the motor home parked in a campground. A little later, we mentioned a tie-dying experience and a walk with a naturalist amid flowers and honeybees. Wilson would have delighted in both of these examples. Do you or your associates look unfavorably upon these recreational vehicles and big trailers in our parks? We believe true professionals push their wants and opinions aside, trying to do the best job possible for everyone. Our extensive exposure to educators, park rangers, conservation organizations, and users makes us believe that Mr. Wilson's professionalism was -- and continues to be -- rare.

Let's return to the quote from the 1962 ORRRC report, paying particular attention to the words ail and their. Have you done all you can to be a professional like Ralph Wilson?

Problems in Outdoor Recreation

The following list of recent events will explain why we believe the world of outdoor recreation is in distress:

* Federal agencies involved in outdoor recreation have diminished or drastically cut their recreation staffs. A sad -- albeit prime -- example is the USDA Soil Conservation Service, now known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which once employed Wilson, four regional specialists, and numerous others. Currently, it boasts no one in Washington, D.C., no regional specialists, and precious few individuals with any outdoor recreation training.

* The USDA Forest Service, which never had more than a handful of outdoor recreation professionals, has drastically curtailed recreation personnel at regional and national levels, and continues to fill recreation positions with untrained foresters and wildlife, range, and timber specialists.

* University recreation curricula have experienced cuts of approximately one-half in both HPER and forestry schools in the last 20 years, and there is a decrease in emphasis on outdoor recreation as a curriculum concentration. There has always been a shortage of topnotch outdoor recreation professors, and that statistic is not improving.

* Outdoor recreation curricula target activities and skills like WSI, archery, canoeing, and hiking with ever-diminishing emphasis on park planning, good economic design, and substantive continuing education. What happened to the boom years of the early to mid-1970s when outdoor-oriented curricula popped up all over the country?

* Jobs. Do you see great numbers of openings for outdoor recreation-trained personnel? In many public systems, the limited recreation jobs go to persons with little or no recreation training. Is it a lack of jobs, lack of interest, or a lack of importance placed on the need for properly trained personnel to handle such tasks? Actually, it's probably a combination of these problems.

* Outdoor recreation research has never been geared toward manager problems. Dr. Geoffrey Godbey, well known for his work as a leisure sociologist, wrote, "Perhaps the biggest limitation of recreation and leisure research, in terms of its ability to shape the profession, is the lack of appropriate dissemination and lack of use." Much of the research completed has been conducted and written by academics for academics; difficult language, style, and focus on statistics make it difficult for practitioners to read. Secondly, other than in site-specific technical reports or a "Research Update" in Parks & Recreation magazine, access to practitioner-oriented research information is relatively unknown among professionals. As evidenced at the 1997 NRPA Congress in Salt Lake City, less and less outdoor recreation-related research is being presented. In fact, in the recently published second edition of Planning Parks for People, there is a section rifled "The Rise and Flop of Outdoor Recreation Research."

* The environmental movement, with its host of "againers," has caused most federal agencies to curtail work with developed sites and give unequal emphasis to wilderness use, which leaves out most Americans (remember the all). It is interesting to note wilderness use is going down, yet the noisemakers clamor for more and more.

* The hierarchy of the private campground sector and its constant complaints about "unfair" competition has caused numerous agencies (both federal and state) to stop building and upgrading campgrounds. The public sector is also eliminating many areas or raising prices so high that all users cannot afford to enjoy their own parks. Public policy has gone amok here.

* Because we haven't done a good job providing enjoyable parks for the American public, it has begun to stay away from parks and outdoor recreation. For example, family camping is down in the eastern United States at both private and public parks, fishing and hunting numbers are down, use at church camps has dropped drastically, and the list goes on and on.

* What is happening in our national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite? Are the increased restriction on visitor access and much higher entry fees the answers to the so-called overuse problem?

This, unfortunately, is a short list of the problems we face today in providing outdoor recreation areas, facilities, and programs for all Americans. Now that we have focused on some of the problems, we would like to present some of the good things that are happening:

* Thousands of defined, reinforced universal campsites are being built all across America. These suit "tenters," wheeled-vehicle users, and persons with disabilities. They also build-out maintenance problems and the myth of overuse.

* Companion care rooms or family assist rooms, which are quite popular in European parks, are being slowly incorporated into many public and private parks. This means a spectrum of persons with disabilities now feels welcome.

* A few public areas, such as Leiber State Recreation Area in Indiana, under stand many young potential park users, particularly teens, are bored with our "one nature trail" and our "Friday evening program on boating safety." Parks should be a fun experience with programming centers providing all sorts of enjoyable programs from insomnia theaters to three-on-three basketball to water volleyball.

* A few substantive park-design workshops have made big dents in our history of poor park design (Figure 2).

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* College students are still interested in outdoor recreation training, especially if university curricula and quality jobs are available. In 1993, when I first began teaching, only one or two of our 20 students were interested in the outdoor concentration; administration considered dropping the outdoor component. However, after four years, including an occasional outdoor-related course, student interest grew.

* Much of the research in outdoor recreation is highly undecipherable and unusable. However, it would be unfair not to mention the contribution that some research has made to the outdoor recreation field. Many studies have been done with information that could be useful to practical applications in the field. For instance, the widely cited work of Bryan, who developed the concept of specialization while examining the characteristics of fly-fishers. He introduced recreation specialization as a continuum of behavior from the general to the particular, indicating that one who fly-fishes is generally more specialized in skill, equipment, experience, and training than one in another classification of fishing activity. People who fly-fish prefer special locations as well as other special characteristics, exhibiting less interest in social contact while fishing. What an interesting thought, demonstrating the need for zoning of uses in facility, access, and program design.

While physical carrying capacity theories are quite suspect, social carrying capacity studies, such as the one conducted on the Delaware Inland Bays in 1992, have shown that users are interested (if given the opportunity) in providing input concerning resource management issues. Based on boater input, the Delaware Department of Environmental Regulation was able to determine visitor perceptions and opinions regarding boating-related issues such as enforcement, marina improvements, the need for additional boat ramps, and boat speed zones.

* Did you know that campers who use family campgrounds enjoy campground programs? A 1990 study at an Indiana state recreation area shows that campground programming may have influenced repeat visitation, overall camper satisfaction with the camping experience, and positive public relations, as well as helped to deter depreciative behavior and increase employee morale. Sixty-seven percent of those families with teenagers brought their teens along; seventy-five percent of the campers had camped at the park an average of 9.6 times over a five-year period; and ninety-six percent of the respondents intended to return to the park.

Conclusion

Understandably, some of the points we've made will not be popular with all P&R readers. Perhaps, however, our thoughts and our reference to the work and professionalism of Ralph C. Wilson will cause some of you to examine your own work in this field. Are you and members of your agency doing a good job in managing your park resources for a quality, fun-filled experience for all Americans? Are you taking advantage of the research data available for the planning, design, and maintenance of your resource areas? These are just a few of the questions you might ask to help raise the necessary interest, desire, and funding to enhance outdoor recreation opportunities across North America.

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